Patch dynamics, in ecology, a theoretical approach positing that the structure, function, and dynamics of an ecological system can be understood and predicted from an analysis of its smaller interactive spatial components (patches). In addition to its significance as a theoretical approach, the term patch dynamics may be used to refer simply to changes that occur over time in the spatial patterns of ecosystem components.

The concept of patch dynamics is based on the observation that ecosystems are spatially heterogeneous—that is, they contain a diverse and unevenly distributed mixture of organisms and resources—and heterogeneity occurs across scales of time and space. Ecological disturbances, such as floods, fires, and outbreaks of disease, are responsible for much of the dynamics of spatial heterogeneity; they disrupt the continuity of the biological community by reducing populations and eliminating species from small areas in the landscape and creating the conditions for other species to move in. As a result, ecosystems can be thought of as mosaics of patches. The patches differ in a variety of ways, including size, shape, composition, natural history, duration in the landscape, and boundary characteristics. As a result, flux, rather than balance, is a major emphasis in patch dynamics research.

A forest patch nested within a landscape mosaic.

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History of patch dynamics

The idea of patch dynamics dates at least to the 1940s, when plant ecologists studied the structure and dynamics of vegetation in terms of interactive patches. In the 1970s, American ecologist Simon A. Levin and American zoologist Robert T. Paine developed a mathematical theory to describe the pattern and dynamics of an intertidal community as a patch mosaic created and maintained by tidal disturbances. By the end of the following decade, patch dynamics had emerged as a dominant perspective in ecology, having supplanted the equilibriumparadigm, which had been increasingly questioned. (The equilibrium paradigm posited that an ecosystem perturbed by a disturbance would eventually return to its undisturbed state, provided that the disturbance was not too strong or too damaging.) Patch dynamics is also conceptually linked with the theory of metapopulations, developed by American mathematical ecologist Richard Levins and others in the 1970s, and with the theory of island biogeography, developed by American ecologist Robert MacArthur and American biologist E.O. Wilson in the 1960s. (The former theory proposed that the collective activities of several distinct but interacting populations drive the ecological fate of the species, and the latter theory posited that islands that are larger and located closer to continents tend to have more species than smaller and more-distant islands.)

Ecological applications

Patch dynamics has been applied most widely at the population, biological community, ecosystem, and landscape scales. A forest, for example, can be viewed as a patchy ecosystem that is composed of gaps in the forest canopy and clusters of trees of different ages that resulted from past disturbances. Various kinds of disturbances frequently occur in forests; for example, canopy trees (a tree whose crown is part of the greater canopy) may be uprooted or broken off by strong winds (windthrows), or they may be killed by diseases or cut down by humans. When an opening is created in the canopy—such as when a canopy tree breaks, dies, or is removed—light, precipitation, and other resources are allowed to reach the forest floor. This event initiates forest succession at a small scale, resulting in the replacement of plant species tolerant to the initial gap conditions by species that are increasingly shade-tolerant or taller-growing. In other words, through competition and thinning, one single tree will eventually dominate the opening and become the canopy tree, and thus the dynamics of the forest can be understood in terms of the changes in the individual gaps between the trees and their interactions with the greater system.

Other ecosystems are similarly patchy. A grassland is a mosaic of patches that may be created by fire, grazing, or the heterogeneous distribution of soil resources, such as water and other nutrients. Individual shrubs are often patchily distributed in a desert, where they trap soil and water to form “fertility islands.” A river is also a patchy system with pools, riffles, and sandbars. In marine environments the spatial patchiness of phytoplankton and zooplankton has long been documented.

Landscapes and regions are made up of groups of distinct terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems that interact with one another. The ecological dynamics between the different patches within these broad scales often are driven by geomorphology (landforms), climate, and changes in land use that surround and contain the area under investigation or separate one patch from another within it. At local scales, topographic, hydrologic, and soil patterns, as well as biological interactions (e.g., competition, predation, and grazing), become important causes and drivers of dynamics. Disturbances, both natural and human-induced, are particularly important in the patch dynamics concept, because they drive the formation and dynamics of patches across all scales.

Landscapes may be viewed as spatially heterogeneous geographic areas or patch mosaics. Landscapes may be as large as regional watersheds that encompass forests, grasslands, rivers, lakes, agricultural fields, and urban areas, or they may be as small as a portion of a local ecosystem in which spatial patchiness affects some ecological process of interest. Thus, the organisms or processes that serve as the subjects of an ecological study often define the spatial scale of the landscape. For example, when investigating how the spatial pattern of herbaceous plants affects the movement of beetles in a grassland, a 100-square-metre (1,076-square-foot) plot is large enough to serve as the study area. A landscape of hundreds of square kilometres may be needed, however, to assess how land-use and land-cover patterns affect the diversity and population dynamics of a bird species. Consequently, landscapes are often hierarchically structured mosaics of different habitats and land uses, in which patch dynamics take place on multiple scales—the study of which has become known as hierarchical patch dynamics. While the concept of patch dynamics rejects the notion of homeostatic equilibrium when it comes to ecological stability, it does acknowledge the existence of ecological stability in terms of a shifting mosaic steady state (where the ecological dynamics of the landscape as a whole remain fairly stable while those at the level of the individual patches that make up the landscape fluctuate).

Conservation implications

Patch dynamics has at least three practical implications. First, the prominent role of disturbances in the patch dynamics concept implies that manipulating the disturbance regime (the spatial and temporal patterns of disturbance) can be an effective method of ecosystem management, particularly for conservation and ecological restoration. For instance, in managed ecosystems, mimicking the dynamics and conditions created by natural disturbances (such as fires and grazing within a grassland) is necessary for the long-term conservation and restoration of an ecosystem.

Second, the concept of patch dynamics suggests that to conserve biodiversity or restore and manage ecosystems successfully, ecological processes (such as nutrient cycling) and ecosystem resilience (the amount of disturbances an ecosystem can absorb without changing its basic structure and function) should take precedence over targeted end points and the preservation of equilibrium states. In other words, conservation and restoration approaches based on the concept of patch dynamics are more flexible than approaches seeking targeted end points. Strategies based on targeted end points, which are envisioned as having a particular mix of species, are often inappropriate because population numbers and species composition fluctuate over time within an ecosystem. In addition, equilibrium states, which are found in climax communities (where succession has halted), rarely exist at the levels of large ecosystems and landscapes.

Third, hierarchical patch dynamics indicates that pattern and process operate on multiple scales and, thus, conservation, ecological restoration, and ecosystem managers must consider factors beyond the target patch, and the landscape context in which the ecosystem resides cannot be ignored. This view essentially calls for a landscape approach to conservation and ecosystem management, instead of the traditional species-centred or single ecosystem-based approach. Although few projects explicitly declare patch dynamics as their guiding principle, the landscape approach, which has been increasingly used since the late 1980s in conservation and ecosystem management efforts worldwide, incorporates the essential elements of patch dynamics.